ATMI completes expansion of Minnesota facility

ATMI, a supplier to the life sciences, has completed a two-year, multi-million dollar expansion of its Bloomington, Minnesota, US manufacturing facility.

With the completion, the company has established a North American hub for the production, marketing and development of its Integrity single-use bioreactor technology.

The added capabilities double the company’s worldwide capacity for the fabrication of the Integrity product line of 2-D and 3-D transfer, storage, mixing and bioreactor vessels, while adding supply chain contingency through a dual-manufacturing capability shared with the company’s existing bioprocess manufacturing plant in Hoegaarden, Belgium.

New jobs will be created at the Bloomington plant in a variety of roles from assembly and testing to laboratory supervision, manufacturing engineering and product engineering.

‘We have developed this world class facility in direct response to the growing needs of our North American customers for additional single-use bioprocess vessel manufacturing capacity. Creating an exact copy of our Belgian facility for change management and supply chain security reasons also helped us to replicate cGMP procedures,’ said Doug Neugold, chief executive of ATMI.

Featuring a 2,500ft2 Class 1000 cleanroom with Class 100 work areas, the expansion also includes a new demonstration and applications laboratory and a separate product development laboratory.

The Bloomington expansion is ISO 9001 certified and cGMP compliant. The production area houses custom-film welding equipment for vessel chamber production and the attachment of fitments and tubing. There is dedicated space to perform 100% integrity testing of each fully assembled vessel, including bio burden, weld strength and particle contamination monitoring.